Fossil fuels are burned throughout the industrialized world to generate heat for heating homes and commercial buildings, for power generation, for use in industrial processes, and for many other applications.
In recent years there has been increasing concern over the NOx produced by burning fossil fuels in conventional type burners. In fact governments in many regions of the world are introducing and enforcing ever more restrictive regulation with regards to NOx production.
To reduce the NOx produced from burning fossil fuels, a special type of burner can be used. Such a burner is referred to generally as a low NOx burner. These special burners are effective in reducing the NOx produced from burning fossil fuels, but they still emit significant amounts of NOx. Furthermore, they are very complex and expensive.
There is therefore a pressing need for an inexpensive No-NOx burner which produces essentially zero (relative to ambient NOx) NOx during the combustion of natural gas or other fuel. Such No-NOx burners can be used in domestic, commercial, and industrial applications.
The reason conventional burners produce NOx is that temperatures within the flame far exceed the temperature required for NOx to be formed from atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen. Further, the peak temperatures of the flame change from well in excess of 3,000 degrees F. to much lower temperatures when combustion is complete. This rapid quenching assures that the unstable NOx compounds within the flame are frozen into metastable compounds of NOx.
To prevent the formation of NOx in the first place, a special burner is required which will promote complete combustion at a much lower temperature so that the adiabatic flame temperature is reduced.
Several approaches to achieving low NOx combustion currently exist. One approach is to use a catalytic burner; however, as is well known in the art, catalytic burners are very expensive and are prone to failure from numerous causes such as catalyst poisoning or particulate blinding, etc.
Another approach is to use surface combustion type burners. Low NOx burners using surface combustion technology are currently commercially available from manufacturers such as Alzeta Corporation which markets them under the Duratherm trademark (see http://www.alzeta.com/products/duratherm.asp). However the surface combustion technology is expensive and problematic and prone to failure and is limited to low capacity per sq. ft.
Still another approach to attaining low NOx combustion is Flue Gas Recirculation (FGR) technology. FGR technology is very expensive and complicated.
All of these technologies can attain low NOx performance; however none of these technologies can achieve zero-NOx performance. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a simple and inexpensive burner that can achieve low NOx performance and even zero NOx performance.
This application discloses a No-NOx burner which is capable of achieving low and even zero NOx from the flameless non-surface combustion of fossil fuel such as natural gas, propane, butane, etc.